Recently I was exploring the caves along the Mississippi River when I stepped into a strange vortex. The walls and ground swirled for a minute, I felt woozy for a brief moment... and when I looked around, the river outside had turned to rapids, and graffiti I'd never seen before adorned the cave walls. I ventured out of the cave and up to the road - now conspicuously missing any automobiles - and spotted a levitating Southside Pride newsbox. Holy shit! I grabbed a copy and saw the date: January, 2074. Holy shit balls!

Southside Pride is, in my time and apparently for many years to come, a community newspaper in south Minneapolis. It's often ridiculed for its repeated coverage (by the same few old men) of the same issues: preserving a local eco-disaster golf course, reforming the Minneapolis police (but not so much that actual systemic change would result... that'd be crazy!) and opposing urban sustainability initiatives like rezoning. The golf course coverage spawned the sensational zine/book/street art campaign, "Make The Golf Course a Public Sex Forest." It's a wingnut kind of paper, but hey, at least newspapers still exist in 2074!

Realizing my presence could really mess up the timeline I'd somehow spelunked myself into (which so far, looked alright), I took the paper and retreated to the same cave, where I quickly became lightheaded and had to sit down. Pretty much the entire newspaper was filled with ads for shitty political candidates, contractors, and, as far as I could tell, cheesy holo-romance novels for straight cis people. I removed the section with actual articles in it, and put the rest under my ass to cushion against the cold, damp, rock. Just then, the cave wall began to crumble, and the vortex re-activated. Before I knew it, the siq new graffiti was gone along with the sound of the river rapids. But that front page of the January 2074 Southside Pride remained in my hand.

The more I read, the more I realized that while some things may change in south Minneapolis, a lot of things tend to stay exactly the same. Hell, the bylines of the articles must belong to the descendants of the same geezers who write for Southside Pride in my time: Cam Jordon (Jr), Tony Bouza (IV) and (Fr)ed Felien! These 2074 articles tell of a future where, as is all too often the case in Minneapolis, language and form changes but underlying values remain the same. Police have been abolished (in name), but non-governmental "violence interrupters" still serve many of their functions on behalf of the city's elites. Non-automobile transportation is flourishing, but people still complain about not having a prime parking spot for their car. Homelessness, necessary for upholding any capitalistic society, is still rampant and politicians are still trying to cover it up rather than give everyone homes. As attitudes about public sex have evolved, the Hiawatha Sex Forest has come to fruition (with a fruit forest too)--but some people still yearn for the olde golf course.

I decided that even with a public sex forest, and the MPD gone, the future Minneapolis deserved better than what I was reading. Therefore I am taking the risk of contaminating the timeline by reproducing the newspaper page here as a cautionary tale. Please share and reproduce it as you see fit to warn others.